Appellate Law

Judicial self-indulgence fails to cure social ills or torture memos

By S. COTUS

Judge Marvin Arrington kicked all the white people out of the courtroom and lectured black people about how to behave and not commit crimes, etc. etc.

The pundits engaged in shallow naval-gazing about whether it was racist or not.

While his preachy self-indulgent sermonizing was widely expected to rid the city of crime, crime levels remained the same: both amongst uneducated poor people with drug problems (where the rates are high) and middle class people that went to Emory, like the judge (amongst whom rates are low).  Shockingly, since this has happened there has been absolutely no movement to reduce the size of the police department to deal with the decrease in crime.

Oh, and speaking of self-indulgence, here are John Yoo?s recently-released torture memos. There is some interesting procedural history which indicates that Professor Yoo really really wanted to write these memos to justify all sorts of crap that he tried to bypass whatever controls were in place on him.

Full post as published by Appellate Law and Practice on April 02, 2008 (boomark / email).